From: Tomer Morad [tomer_morad@hotmail.com] Sent: יום חמישי 20 דצמבר 2001 20:45 To: tomer_morad@hotmail.com Subject: Update from buenos aires Hola everyone! This update is still from buenos aires. As I said in my last email, I rented a studio apartment in the center of the city of buenos aires. I have been passing my time with sleeping, eating, studying spanish, salsa and tango. I must say that the culture in buenos aires is really nice, and the locals like to do many activities beside work. But... yesterday something interfered with the quiet atmosphere that dominated my first two weeks here - a state of emergency has been called by the Argentinean president. First some background - The Argentineans have their local currency, the peso, pegged to the us dollar. This means that one dollar equals one peso, regardless of the market trends. To cover up for the demand for dollars, the government borrowed a lot of money from the international community, until the IMF almost stopped lending them money. Realizing this the poor Argentineans (not the ones in the capital) stormed into shops to gather some food, and as a result the state of emergency has been called. This state basically means that all constitutional rights do not hold for the following month. It is really calming to know I have no rights... A few moments after I heard the news I started hearing strange noises from the streets. I wend down there and I saw a few locals pounding with pans and spoons... I decided that the action must take place at the casa rosada (the government building, located in the placa de mayo), so I went there. It is a 15-minute walk from my apartment. To my surprise it was empty... I thought to myself that the Argentineans are not impressed by the situation, so I headed back. The streets were quite empty until I reached my building, and then I saw under my apartment hundreds of people with their pans... Understanding the severity of the situation, and that it is dangerous to be in the streets, I made the only rational choice - I went back to my apartment. Took my camera, and headed down again... The people were marching towards the placa de mayo, with the cnn and other networks filming. Maybe you saw me on cnn? It was a feeling of a grand fiesta, people were generally happy for the reason to go to the streets... On the way there, trying to assess the situation I noticed that there were not too many children marching in the streets, but there were still some. This means that most of the parents wanted their children to remain home... When I reached the placa de mayo, it was full of people. My assessment is 30000 people. It was a really genuine spontaneous demonstration, unlike the "spontaneous" demonstration after barak won the elections in israel. There weren't hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of sound equipment there, just pans and spoons. The crowd was singing "argentina! argentina!" and some more patriotic songs. Even the president's mother was a subject in one of the songs... I of course joined in the fun and created more havoc... As I said people were generally happy and smiling, but as they approached the CNN camera, they became sad and angry... They can be palestinians! One lady took it to the extreme by talking to CNN with a knife in her hand, and after the interview laughed and smiled. Someone in the crowd brought to my attention that the police are bringing backups... On the casa rosada I could see more and more police, until there were about five observers on the building, and many more on the ground. The time was about 1am. Before I know it the police fired tear gas on the crowd... I don't know why, it was very calm. Maybe because of our remarks on the president's mother the police got upset. I ran with everyone from the gas, but it cought up with me... I almost choked and had alot of tears, but thinking of it now it wasn't that bad. Maybe we should switch to nurve gas in gaza? A few minutes later, after fleeing the placa, all was calm again, I could breath and my eyes didn't hurt. I joined the remarks on the president's mother... Today my spanish school was closed and I got angry. I will wait and see about the situation here. A meeting of more than three people is prohibited by law, unless there is an aproval from the police. This makes it a little more complicated here. If it does not get better, I am out of here. Chau! Tomer. _________________________________________________________________ Get your FREE download of MSN Explorer at http://explorer.msn.com/intl.asp.